Marc Lewis came by his interest in the neuroscience of addiction honestly. Expelled from his first graduate program for stealing drugs, Lewis kicked his addiction to opiates at the age of 30. He then made a successful bid for a PhD in applied psychology at the University of Toronto and spent more than a decade researching cognition-emotion and personality from a psychologist’s perspective. Lewis switched to neuroscience in 2000, and now investigates the neurobiological systems underlying emotion and emotional development. Lewis considers his new field an “exploding area” for addiction research, as neurochemical processes help explain “how powerful these drives are, why people can’t stop wrecking lives.” Now at the Radboud University in The Netherlands, Lewis’s current project investigates the breakdown of self-control in alcoholics in environments where alcohol is available. Read about the neuroscience of addiction and Lewis’s own struggles in this month’s Reading Frames.
Vern Schramm started applying ...
